DON'T BUY THIS MOTHERBOARD.
Hee hee hee! This thread is insane!... It indicates just how messed up the Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard is.
I've had my A8N-SLI Premium for almost 2 months. 2 freakin' months of trying to get this new system working. 2 months of crashing, blue screens, instability, and spontaneous reboots that come and go. I've made several trips back to the retailer to RMA parts. OCZ has RMA'd my memory. But, clearly, the motherboard design is the evil one here. Note that I swapped out the motherboard once already.
Sometimes, just when I think I've got all the problems beat and the system seems stable for a day or more, they return. This motherboard has provided me with 2 months of hell.
Here are some things I experienced and learned:
1. NVActiveArmore causes instability. Don't use it. I tried everything to get this feature to work - 6.65, 6.66, various settings, different cables, reinstall windows, etc.
2. NVFirewall corrupted my downloads. Firefox or IE would allow me to surf without any problems, but when I downloaded a file, it would be corrupted. You don't know it is corrupted until you try to run it. I finally gave up on NVFirewall and installed ZoneAlarm.
3. 4x512M OCZ Platinum Rev 2? Forget it. The system was ALWAYS unstable to varying degrees no matter if I overclocked, underclocked, threatened my PC, updated BIOS, updated drivers, etc. This motherboard only works with 2 memory sticks.
4. Overclocking in general... VERY picky motherboard. A lot of stuff didn't make sense. Certain cpu, htt, fsb, ddr frequencies would work and others wouldn't. I tried isolating overclocking parameters, but I got really weird results. I actually found that the most stable system I ever achieve was 2.4 GHz CPU and DDR333. Dropping the CPU clock while massaging settings so other clocks remained the same, would actually increase instability. It was weird.
5. BIOS. My A8N-SLI Premium is currently DEAD. While upgrading to the 009 beta BIOS today, it died. I don't get POST. It's dead dead dead. Nice, huh? I'm taking it back to the retailer tomorrow - for the 2nd time.
6. I had to install the X2 drivers from AMD. That helped with instability but didn't fix it.
7. When installing drivers and applications, I used Acronis True Image so I could easily restore to a previous good state. Otherwise, you're just one bad driver away from your whole system being unstable again and having no way out.
8. There are several other issues I've encountered and had to solve - but I forget them all. I know that I came across a thread where dual video cards were a problem. Also, the 2nd Raid controller is no good. Basically, this motherboard has been the most challenging system I've ever set up and - get this - I'm a computer hardware engineer with a 1st class honors B.A.Sc. degree and over a decade of hardware design experience! I'm supposed to be "an expert"! Ha hahahahaha...
Robert.